Bullshit

Having just read Supermarket by Bobby Lee, I’m thinking about all the time I spend in my local supermarket, which is a lot of time. A lot of time. Because I work from home the supermarket is directly across the street from my house. Which translates to dashing over there every time I am missing even the most unnecessary condiments or ingredients—like, literally, if there’s no mustard, even if I’m having a meal that I would not normally use mustard with, I am across the street buying mustard within seconds. Because I can.

This is what being comfortable with your middle aged-ness looks like, BTW. Buying mustard because you can.

Anyway, I literally am in the supermarket at least once a day, sometimes twice, sometimes, in a cascade of incompetence, three or four times. Due to its convenience I imagine you can buy a long list of unlikely things at the supermarket, simply because somewhere deep in my lazy lizard brain I want the supermarket to sell whatever it is I need, from socks to furniture to deck screws. And when you spend as much time in a supermarket as I do, you become aware of just how crazy a place it is. On the one hand you have the food abstraction, as everything is presented in a plastic-wrapped, nutrition-labeled unit. And on the other hand you have the people, who are kind of nuts. And on the third hand you have the company behind it all, which is probably run by alien lizard people.

Nutrition Units

Sometimes I think supermarkets are part of an insidious psychological experiment. On the one hand, I am so divorced from my wild, hunter-gatherer-farmer roots that if the supermarkets were all sucked into a temporal anomaly, I’d starve almost immediately, withering away in a matter of minutes as my DNA simply assessed the situation as impossible and gave up.

On the other hand, their stocking practices are clearly designed to test us all. The supermarket is probably the only business in the world where being sold out of something indicates a lack of interest advising towards a lengthy think before reordering. Based on how often I will discover some product or foodstuff that I really enjoy, only to never see it again, I sometimes picture the manager sitting in his tiny office pondering the empty shelves in his store as some sort of insoluble mystery, a puzzle beyond human comprehension.

Insane People of The Supermarket

Shopping for food is a gauntlet of microaggressions and minor humiliations. Just the other day I ran across the street to purchase a single item, which anyone will tell you is a rookie move: Buying a single item is basically inviting the universe to enrage you, because the difficulty in paying and leaving the store is the inverse of the difficulty involved in acquiring your groceries.

I got behind a woman who was finishing her check out; all her items had been bagged and rung up. All she had to do was pay and exit the store. Which took a phenomenally long amount of time, as she proceeded to treat the check out line as if she were alone in the world. She checked her phone, fished for her sunglasses, unscrewed the cap on her water bottle and took a sip, went through her pockets, and performed a dozen other small organizational moves while I stood there, my one item rung up, the point-of-sale just past her. Finally, after enduring thirty seconds of this, I reached past her to pay, at which point, naturally, she became offended. The checkout guy, for his part, was clearly three hours into a four-hour shift and wanted nothing more than for all of us to dissolve into Thanos Snap Dust at our earliest opportunities.

The Lizard People

The fact that the company that operates this grocery store imagines that anyone enters it for any reason other than it is the closest and most convenient place to purchase Doritos and other necessities of life proves their alien origin. The other thing that proves their alien origin are there insane promotions, which generally involve complex ?games’ that require their customers to collect inane pieces of paper in the vague hope of winning money or groceries. The rules are labyrinthine, and the end result is that you’re handed a stack of paper about an inch thick every time you check out of the store.

I get that I’m supposed to hurry home and tear open my … I don’t know, tokens? tickets? and do … something with them. But I don’t, because my life does not revolve around jumping through the hoops my corporate masters put in place for me. I throw those tokens away, because I am a normal person. If the grocery store truly wants my affection and loyalty, they could hand me a crisp $5 bill once a week when I check out. That would do it. But this game token business? Lizard people thought that up.

Also, the grocery store stopped selling alcohol a few years ago, which angered me unreasonably as I now have to walk two blocks, like a sucker.

You might be surprised to read this, friend, but I was not always friends with alcohol. Oh, I always wanted to be friends with alcohol, but it took me a long time to find my way in. Much of my wasted youth was spent fighting with alcohol, because I hadn’t yet found my true calling within it (whiskey). There were many evenings wasted drinking lite beer and other, worser things. Worser than lite beer? It’s possible. You just have to dig down into the Jagermeister-level stuff.

The Golden Road

Today I stand before you a disciple in the Church of Whiskey. Sure, I’ll drink anything, especially if it’s free, but whiskey is my first and dearest love. When I was a callow young man, though, I hadn’t yet figured this out, so I experimented, and almost killed all of my friends (and myself) in the process.

See, I knew there was a whole universe of booze out there I hadn’t yet figured out, and I craved that knowledge. I wanted to be that guy who walks into a swanky bar and just orders something very sophisticated and cool, but I was stuck ordering Coors Lite. Once when I was twenty-three and feeling saucy I ordered a Depth Charge without really understanding what is was, and things went … poorly. So I decided I would have to do some research, and I further decided I would do that research via parties that I threw.

This was a mistake.

Party the First: Ti Many Martoonis. My first foray into cocktails was a Martini party. Martinis seem inherently cool. First, the James Bond thing. Second, the sleekness of the drink: Two ingredients, unless you count the olive and possibly the olive juice for a Dirty Martini. It just screamed the sort of drink that grown-ups swilled while discussing, I don’t know, escrow and the Cold War. So I invited everyone over for a Martini party and grabbed some recipes for Martinis from the Internet. I think I had a Dirty Martini, a Chocolate Martini, a classic, and I had some gin on the side just in case some communists showed up and didn’t want vodka.

I woke up on party day sick as a dog. Like, seriously ill. I should have canceled the party and focused on making a last will and testament, but in what may be the worst example of trying an attempted mind over matter, I decided not to cancel. So a couple dozen people showed up, and I mixed up Martinis while on the verge of throwing up for several hours. At one point I actually retired to another room to lie down, because I thought I was about to die.

To this day I can’t abide Martinis or vodka. Or, ironically since it’s a mainstay of the Avery Cates universe, gin.

To say that the Martini experiment was a disaster is being kind to disasters. Although the bitter taste of humiliation saved me, I think, from being lured into a life of vodka-swilling, and thank god. Did my friends all wisely ghost me and refuse all future invitations? They did not. At least, not then. Since then? Sure, I haven’t seen anyone in ages.

The New Year’s Eve Shots Massacree. My next stab at alcohol sophistication came a while later, when I decided to hijack a friend’s NYE party in order to mix up a variety of fanciful shots. Shots are only acceptable when you’re young, in my opinion; the combination of Challenge Accepted! Syndrome and the obvious goal of not actually enjoying what you’re consuming is very on-brand for being young and stupid. And I was very young and very stupid.

My shot menu was disgusting. There was a Bubblegum Shot, which I can tell you right now was both extraordinarily accurate in terms of taste and extraordinarily horrifying in terms of basic human decency. There was also that time-honored Basic Bitch of shots, the Kamikaze. After that things get hazy, because even when you’re young and stupid shots are never meant to be the focus. For god’s sake, they’re designed to get you quickly inebriated so you can then slow down and enjoy yourself.

We … did not do that. The end of the evening looked like a zombie apocalypse movie. To this day I can still taste that Bubblegum shot, and my stomach flips when I think about it.

Did all these terrifying experiences drive me to the homely, Deadwood-esque simplicity of whiskey? Damn right it did. It also serves as the figurative slave leaning in behind me and whispering ‘remember, you are mortal’ every time I walk into a bar and decide that tonight is the night I give Dylan Thomas a run for his money. Because every time I think about drinking a bit too much, I taste bubblegum.

In the wake of this ridiculous and infuriating scandal concerning rich, famous people spending huge amounts of money to get their shiftless, dead-eyed children into top schools via an array of Benny Hill-level ruses, I am of course moved to ponder my own college experience. Which was largely uneventful; I wasn’t particularly interested in college, certain as I was that I would soon be a famous cult writer raking in millions from devoted fans, but I went because my parents made it clear that my alternatives all involved uniforms and asking people if they wanted fries with that.

I diligently did the applications, essays, and interviews, and got into some pretty decent schools, but wound up going to Rutgers for the in-state tuition and relative nearness of home, because I am lazy and timid. I also arranged to room with a kid from my high school, which meant my entire Freshman Year was essentially a waste of time, because all we did was delve into an ever-deeper simulated universe of our own making. We stayed in our room, made hilarious recordings to send home to our friends, and had deep conversations. We did not really attend many classes.

Yes, I was an asshole.

I don’t want to talk about grades or the socioeconomics of higher education or the fact that bachelor’s degrees in non-STEM fields are pretty much just coupons for entry-level jobs because they demonstrate you can wake up, hold to a schedule, and perform soul-killing tasks with aplomb.

No, I want to talk about Manhunt.

The Least Dangerous Game

You know: Manhunt. That slightly more mature version of Hide and Seek that adds an element of fascism and mob mentality to keep things exciting: One person starts off as ?it,’ the others hide. When It finds you, you also become ?It’ until it’s everyone hunting for the last person.

Old friends from high school visited one day in the fall, and since we were on an isolated campus with no alcohol or anything to do (and this was before Internet, people. Before. Internet.) we decided to go to the golf course on campus at night and play a game of Manhunt. In theory, this was a madcap, kooky thing to do—we had to register for the draft, and here we are playing a kids’ game! WE’RE HILARIOUS—and in practice it was, you know, kind of fun. Until we lost someone.

We kicked the game off: Someone started off as ?It’ and the rest of us scattered while they closed their eyes and counted. Some of us had clever ideas, like climbing trees, and some just relied on the shadows and terrain. One by one we were all caught … except one guy. Let’s call him Hanzo.

Hanzo was nowhere to be found. For a while this was exciting—Hanzo had found the greatest hiding spot of all time! Then it became boring. Then it became worrying. We gave up on the game and started shouting Hanzo! MANHUNT is OVER!

But Hanzo would not emerge from his hiding place. We began to hate Hanzo. He was ruining our night—possibly, if he was found facedown in a pond or something, our entire lives. Despite this reasonable fear we put in about an hour of searching and then returned to the dorms … where Hanzo was hanging out with another friend of ours, eating chips and watching TV. He’d gotten bored because of his hiding skilz, and simply wandered home.

We collectively chose to not speak to Hanzo for the rest of the evening. He now claims not to remember the incident.

What’s the point? Just that I was both an asshole and an idiot when I was in college. All I can say is, thank goodness Instagram didn’t exist.

I’ve worn glasses since I was a wee lad. When I first got glasses, my father, bless his heart, was convinced I was going to suddenly become Babe Ruth on the Little League field, where up until that point I was a bit more Mario Mendoza. His childlike faith that glasses were going to transform me into a star athlete still warms me today. Ah, Dad, you fool.

So I’ve been wearing glasses for most of my life—in fact, I really can’t recall a time in my life when I could see clearly without them, a time when I didn’t wear glasses. I don’t recognize myself in mirrors without them, frankly. Contacts? Jebus, the thought of jamming something into my eye is terrifying. Plus also I am incompetent and there is absolutely zero doubt that I would wind up with contact lenses embedded in my brain.

Trust me.

The Price of Incompetence

I was initially told I needed glasses to see the board in class, and so I didn’t have to wear them all the time. Now these first glasses—let’s call them Lenses Mark One—were huge. I mean, huge. Like, they were twice the size of my face, and the lenses seemed thick enough to offer views of the future, or possibly to protect my eyes from laser attacks. Like, they were big.

And expensive, relatively speaking. By this point in my existence I think it’s fair to say I’d become much more expensive than either of my parents had ever imagined possible, and the glasses were just one more insult. I mean, I was nine years old and already breaking down physically. Where would it end? Very likely in an iron lung, or perhaps a plastic bubble costing millions of dollars.

Anyway, the glasses were huge and so I only wore them when necessary, furtively slipping them on when I absolutely had to glean some information from the blackboard. Otherwise they went into my shirt pocket, and it took me about six days to lose them.

I thought my mother was going to have a stroke. Another pair of glasses was procured, and my parents sat me down and offered a rundown of my relative value when compared to the glasses, which was not in my favor. So I started wearing my glasses all the time, in terror.

True Grit

This did solve the problem of my general incompetence as it intersected my glasses, and I did manage to never lose a pair of glasses again, because, as noted above, I can’t even imagine living without a pair on my face. However, true incompetence, such as the kind I enjoy, is never defeated. It is only temporarily stymied, and although it took twenty years I did manage to cost myself another pair.

I took it upon my self to do some repair work in my mother’s basement, working with some concrete and such. I’d just gotten new glasses, and twenty years of wearing them had burned in some behaviors. Friends used to mimic my patented three-part nervous habit of cleaning my glasses, off my baseball cap, and running a hand through my hair. I did this about five times an hour, so while I was working with cement and sweat and dust in my mother’s basement, wearing my new glasses, I cleaned them regularly … using my concrete-encrusted shirt. By the end of the day I couldn’t understand why my vision was so blurry.

As I forked over the money for a new pair, I thought I could hear my dear departed father chuckling somewhere, toasting his son, the idiot.

Sometimes it’s weird to think I’ll be wearing glasses for the rest of my life … but no one who comes across my bones will know. The good news is that since I’m convinced the rest of you are figments of my imagination who only exist to amuse me, all I need to do to make you all go away is take off my glasses. Problem solved.

The other day I woke up and went to the bathroom to brush my teeth and discovered that one of the cats had gone into the shower at some point and taken a huge grumpy crap on the floor. Now, if you live with animals you no doubt have had this exact experience—let’s face it, no matter what kind of animal you choose to invite into your home, chances are very, very high that they will take a dump inside the house at some point. And heck, with cats you more or less expect them to shit in the house! It’s kind of the whole point. So it’s hard to get too upset when they occasionally send a message via their bowel movements.

Of course, this prompted an immediate DefCon 5 cleanup of the shower, but I didn’t get too upset. My wife, The Duchess, and I lived through the Mad Pooper, after all.

The Mad Pooper What Poops at Midnight and At All Other Times

The Mad Pooper episode was a couple of years ago, now, and it is exactly what you think: One of our cute little cats began crapping all over the house. Again, if you have cats, this is going to happen from time to time, so we didn’t panic at first. A poop once in a blue moon is nothing to get excited about.

But it happened again, and again. When we found a dookie in our bed one morning, we knew something had to be done. The Mad Pooper had to be unmasked and taken into the Vet for a checkup, and possibly sold to cat traffickers. I’m just kidding about that, but the Mad Pooper was definitely getting under our skin. We were even starting to look at each other with some side-eye, trying to decide if it was at all possible that one of us was the culprit in the strangest case of marital passive aggressiveness ever.

In the end, the Mad Pooper chose to reveal herself: Our cat Coco, who is about eight pounds and moves with the sort of deliberate slowness indicative of either great wisdom or great stupidity, walked into the bathroom one day, looked at us, and proceeded to crap right on the rug while maintaining eye contact. It was terrifying. We got her checked out, bought another litter box, and the Mad Pooper was no more.

The Hygiene of Homer

Since then, we acquired a new tenant in the form of Homer, who started off life as an adorable little nubbin and then swole into a being we refer to in hushed tones as The Junkyard Cat. Homer is just a regular cat in many ways, but not all ways. For one thing, he reacts to any kind of unexpected situation with hissing and scratching, and then returns five seconds later with a hangdog expression that definitely implies you should never ever startle poor Homer again.

For another, he is the dirtiest cat imaginable.

Inasmuch as I contemplate the act of going to the bathroom beyond my own necessities, I assume it to be one of those simple natural functions that nature has more or less perfected. And yet Homer emerges from the little box looking like someone tried to mug him. He is always covered in litter and his own excretions, and I am not making this up.

And yes, this means that if you have ever shaken my hand, you have basically touched Homer’s butt.

Homer does make sad, futile attempts to groom himself, but there’s something missing, and so he spends much of his time moping about with a general expression of Eyeore on his face while his hindquarters resemble an industrial accident. There’s nothing physically wrong with Homer; one assumes it is the lack of a parental influence when he was a kitten. Or possibly a simmering hatred of us all that he expresses in an unusual and disgusting manner.

All this to say that a mere pile of poop in my shower does not phase me. At least it doesn’t as long as I can remember where I was and how much I drank the night before.

Being an objective and sober assessment of the people you encounter on line at the Post Office.

I love the Post Office. I think it’s frankly amazing that you can stuff something into an envelope, pay a small fee, and it shows up at its intended location a few days later. I find it incredible that you can literally get every detail wrong in the address and somehow the letter still arrives. Sure, the Post Office has problems, I won’t deny it. It requires like 15 minutes to mail a single thing to Europe, for example, so god help your immortal soul if you have, say, five things to mail to Europe. Still! I am amazed.

I understand why people hate the Post Office, however. The lines, the forms, the often unfriendly people who work there—I get it. We live in an age of wonders, and yet I have to fill out a customs form by hand and watch while the postal worker keyboards everything I just wrote down into the computer. It’s madness!

The real madness at the Post Office is the people you’re in line with. For real.

Hell’s Waiting Room

I’ve got a lot of experience with the Post Office. I started publishing my zine, The Inner Swine in 1995, and for a while I was mailing several hundred copies of that thing every few months, and I was never sufficiently organized or smart enough to do any kind of bulk mailing. So it was stamps—stamps, motherfuckers!—and envelopes and carting boxes of envelopes to the Post Office. I also used to submit short stories to magazines via mail because I was born so long ago—so very long—that there was no Internet. So I would include a self-addressed-stamped-envelope (SASE) with my submission, and I’d have to get the postal worker to weigh the whole thing and put postage on the SASE as well.

What I mean is, man, I know what it’s like to use the Post Office. And I know the people you meet in line there.

The Amazed Impatient Jackass. The rule is, any time you go to the Post Office and wait in line, someone will walk in, pause for dramatic effect, and say something like ‘I can’t believe this.’ They will then proceed to sigh every few seconds, mutter under their breath about the unbelievable length of the line, the stupidity of the people working there, and how the universe is generally speaking a torture device calibrated especially for them. They will often make phone calls so they can complain about the line to other people in real time. When they get to the window, there is a 101% chance they will get a money order.

The Confused. Man, I get it—sometimes the Post Office is inscrutable. There are strange rules and odd forms and sometimes even I get the feeling the guy behind the window is just making that federal law up to fuck with me. But then you have the people who have never in their lives sent a piece of mail, apparently. Here’s a real, actual interaction I once witnessed:

Postal Worker: You have to put a return address too.

Confused: That is the return address.

Postal Worker: … then you have to put the address you want it send to.

Confused: <grumbling> Fine. <scribbles> Here.

Postal Worker: You’ve got to switch them. You’ve got the return address in the ‘to’ line.

Confused: … wat.

I’m not making that up.

The Older Gentleman or Gentlewoman Who’s There to Buy One Stamp but Also to Chat with Everyone. They’re sweet, and I wish them well. But when they get to the window and decide to spend a few minutes telling the postal employee about the nice time they spent on line in a Post Office recently, I want them to burn.

Someday, a few centuries from now, the Post Office will have a real website that enables you to mail things with an App and, I don’t know, probably a teleportation device or perhaps an army of gnomes who will burst from the floorboards and seize your package and fly off on winged monkeys or something[1]. Until then, we’ll have to wait on line.

————–

[1]Remember: Sufficiently advanced technology may look a lot like gnomes and flying monkeys.

As many of you know, I currently live with one wife (the formidable Duchess) and five cats. Your reaction to the cat population in my house probably varies in accordance with your own pet population; some people have one dog or other reasonable number of small animals, reptiles, fish, or birds in their home, and think five is, like, way too many. Others have a whole second apartment they rent just to house their brood of pets, and they think we’re amateurs.

The main downside to having pets, for me, is worrying about them when we travel. As hard as I work to not go on trips (and The Duchess will tell you—at length—how good I am at being so terrible a travel partner that she thinks twice before suggesting we go anywhere these days), I’m still dragged from my comfortable home onto economy-plus flights to various places, and we have to get a small army of people to take care of the critters. Most recently we had to do this for the Christmas holiday as we visited The Duchess’ family in Texas, where we spent a pleasant afternoon watching Cary grant movies with her mother. One of those movies was Topper, and that’s a whole thing because when I was a kid I named my very first pet Topper because believe it or not, my brother and I were huge fans.

No, Seriously, It Was a Thing

So … you might be wondering what in the fuck a ‘topper’ is. It was a 1937 film starring Cary Grant, Constance Bennett, and Roland Young as the titular Cosmo Topper. Grant and Bennett play rich ‘jazzy’ types who live fast lives and torture Cosmo with their frivolity and devil-may-careness. When they die in a car accident, they return as ghosts to haunt Topper, and turn his life upside down.

It’s a light, very dated story, but it was hit and inspired several sequels and a TV series. When I was a kid, I was delighted by the way the ghosts would fade in and out; they’d often get Topper into a zany situation and then disappear when someone else walked in, making him look insane. Great fun!

Yes, my brother and I were weird.

Anyway, when I was a kid I also got Pet Fever, which happens. My parents fought the good fight. They knew that any animal brought into the house would quickly become their third child, and so they worked super hard to fight off my desire for a thing to love. One gambit that was temporarily effective was getting me a goldfish, which my brother and I named Topper in honor of my unusual favorite story at the time.

Topper was … a goldfish. He floated. He ate. He excreted this long, thin poops that fascinated us. That was basically it, but he was pretty. He didn’t live too long, which obviously means we had no fucking idea how to care for a goldfish. We basically just put him in a bowl, changed the water occasionally, and fed him with zero plan. When he died we were very sad and had a ceremonious burial, placing poor Topper in a baby food jar and burying him in the backyard. I still feel badly about Topper; when I realized that he died like, super young and it was probably because we were idiots, I had a few nightmares, and I fully expect that when I die and find myself in hell, Topper will be waiting to extract his revenge.

We then promptly got another goldfish, who died a week later. We went through another bunch of fish who all died promptly, and things began to get a little grim around the Somers house.

Enter Pissy

Speaking of weird pet names, around this time our next door neighbors, who were German and Yugoslavian, inherited their son’s cat. They didn’t want the poor thing, and left her down in their basement and gave her no attention whatsoever. I started visiting that cat every day and she was ecstatic to see me each and every time.

The name they gave her sounded to our American ears like Pisshy. So when I heard that they were going to get rid of her and campaigned to save her by adopting her, my parents (glancing at the growing graveyard of goldfish doom outside) wearily agreed with the stipulation that we could not, of course, continue to call her Pisshy. So we renamed her Missy, and all was well. I had my pet, and a lifetime preference for cats was born.

This is a long way of saying this is how you wind up with five cats: You kill a bunch of innocent goldfish through ignorance and a lack of Internet (I swear, if Google had existed in 1982 Topper might still be alive), you save a sad, lonely cat from someone’s basement, and then you deny your formidable wife a dog in 2003 and she agrees to settle for a cat, discovers she adores cats, and begins collecting them like she collects shoes.